Losing Iraq: Inside the Postwar Reconstruction Fiasco

Losing Iraq: Inside the Postwar Reconstruction Fiasco David L. Phillips Date: 26 April, 2005   —   $16.50   —   Book product page Rating:

This is a sad companion to Larry Diamond's book, "Squandered Victory". Where Diamond's experience was with post-war Iraq, Phillips was a State Department player with Iraqi connections even before the war. Phillips presents all the planning for post-war Iraq that was subsequently ignored by President Bush and the Department of Defense. He fills in the details of an operation that was poorly led and based on pie-in-the-sky projections that fell apart under even casual scrutiny.

Phillips makes the point that the post-war operation should have been handled, if not by the UN, then at least by the US State Department which had a plan and has the experience to pull off a nation building exercise. To have the Department of Defense -- whose unofficial motto is, "We don't do nation building" -- in charge of nation building was just pure idiocy. When Condoleezza Rice said, "The 82nd Airborne should not escort kids to kindergarten," she was absolutely right, and she should have stuck to her guns.

Now, Phillips tells us, his Iraqi Kurd buddies refer to the period between 1991 and 2003 as "the golden years".

Historians will characterize the disaster in Iraq as a catastrophic failure of leadership. Phillips takes us inside President Bush's administration and highlights the internal bickering, backstabbing, and inter-departmental rivalries that led to one counterproductive decision after another,

Responsibility for the interagency breakdown rests with Condoleezza Rice. ...As experienced bureaucratic infighters, Cheney and Rumsfeld were able to manipulate the debate so that their views would prevail. Though Rice is "like a daughter" to Powell, she did little to prevent Cheney and Rumsfeld from marginalizing the Secretary of State.

David Kay maintained that Rice willfully suppressed Powell's more prudent approach to Iraq, leaving him "hanging out to dry." Kay accused Rice of botching the intelligence management of Iraq's WMD and turning a blind eye as hawks on the principals committee cherry-picked intelligence to justify policy decisions that had already been made.

During the post-war period, unmanaged disagreements within Bush's cabinet members caused confusion and even had Republican Senators pleading with President Bush to show some leadership, "The president has to be the president," admonished Richard Lugar. "That means the president over the vice-president, and over the secretaries of state and defence. And Dr Rice cannot carry that burden alone." What a mess.

Phillips goes into a lot of detail about the State Department's planning for post-war Iraq and dialogs with Iraqi dissidents and expatriates. He then details how the Vice President and the Secretary of Defense counseled Gen. Garner and then L. Paul Bremmer to ignore it all,

The Bush administration never had a plan or program for running post-war Iraq; instead, it focused on a person -- Achmed Chalabi, who, it believed, could transform Iraq into a liberal democracy and support U.S. goals in the Middle East.

And what's Chalabi up to now? He suddenly got religion and signed up as the political arm of al-Sadr's Shiite fundamentalist Mehdi Army. Great plan, President Bush. What a mess. If you want to know how it all fell apart, read "Losing Iraq".